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Design research asks: How do we truly understand the people we are designing for? What do their motivations, behaviors, and needs reveal about opportunities for innovation? In this hands-on, studio-style course, students will gain practical experience across the full research cycle: framing strong questions, recruiting participants, conducting fieldwork through interviews, diary studies, surveys, and usability tests, and making sense of both qualitative and quantitative data. They will hone the skills of observation, listening, synthesis, and storytelling–turning raw data into insights that not only guide design decisions but also ground technology in humanity, ensuring that what we create reflects and respects real human experience.

In an era where digital connections dominate our social interactions, public spaces have become increasingly isolating. Make Friends Everywhere is a seven-week course designed to explore how interactive art installations and other projects can transform public spaces into hubs of spontaneous or deliberate social connection. This course teaches students how to design interactive experiences that encourage encounters, spark conversations, and evoke shared poetic moments in everyday public life. Make Friends Everywhere! is more than just a design course—it’s a movement to reclaim public spaces as places of connection, wonder, purpose, and human interaction. Through thoughtful design and creative experimentation, we can create compelling moments that bring strangers together and remind us of the magic of real-world encounters.

This course explores the ways that we perform on and for the Internet. Students will conduct their own performances with the web as a virtual stage. We will study artists’ approaches to performance including early Net Art, collaborative virtual performances, telepresence, appropriation, and social media interventions. We will discuss questions including: are we creating a character every time we make a new profile? Is it possible to ever truly be “live” on a streaming platform? How do the web’s built-in participatory structures complicate/aid these performances?

Note: Performance is a broad and amorphous term! You are encouraged to take this course even if you do not consider yourself a performer or someone who wants to be in front of a camera.

This seminar explores the history and current representations of conversational AI — robot, therapist, friend, disembodied brain, parrot, and so on.

George Box’s famous observation that ‘All models are wrong, but some models are useful’ applies to our understanding of AI. Since the mechanism and details of AI are too various and strange for most users to approach directly, the nearly universal impulse, since Turing’s imitation game, is to substitute “if it walks like a duck” tests to ask whether an AI is smart, empathetic, caring, human, and so on.

However, every metaphor hides some details while distorting others, every such substitution provides both value and risk. Telling people they can think of AI as a partner, an assistant, an intern, or a servant already changes which affordances and interaction patterns they will and won’t assume the tool offers. And that’s before we get to parrot, golem, centaur, or digital god, or to questions about whether we assume that the tools do or don’t have humanity, or gender.

The goal of the class is not to understand AI’s “true” nature — hyperobjects have no such thing — but to see that all choices of comparison and analogy come with tradeoffs, and that the metaphors now in wide circulation have ramifications for how hundreds of millions of users regard their use of these tools.

This is a reading- and writing-intensive class. Students are expected to use AI tools in order to form educated opinions; assignments will be written work plus oral presentations on how representations of AI can affect user behavior.

TBD